All are descriptions used by more than 40 callers to a telephone hotline the city set up. It asked residents who smelled the smell to call in with some specifics.

"The smell test is different for different people," Flory says. "For me, it's just something that's really hard to describe, a real pungent, foul odor."

Tracking down the source has become a major civic project. A local tomato canning plant quickly emerged as one potential culprit, and it hired an odor consultant who spent days measuring the city's olfactory qualities with a piece of sniffing equipment called a "Nasal Ranger," with mixed results.

The city's wastewater treatment plant also was fingered as a potential source. The officials in charge of it acknowledge the plant sometimes can turn up a nose.

"Let's just say it's a recurring thing," she adds. "It bothers a lot of people."

Such different descriptions of smells are hardly surprising, says Dave Smith, supervisor at the Yolo-Solano regional Air Quality Management District.

"Odors are like pornography," Smith says. "It's in the nose of the beholder."

Woodland is a fast-growing agricultural and bedroom community northeast of Sacramento. It is surrounded by farmland but also has become home to thousands of residents who commute to work in the state capital.

Jim Smith, editor of the Woodland Daily Democrat, says he thinks a lot of newcomers aren't familiar with what living in farm country can mean. Much of the complaints, he said, have come from residents of the newly developed east side, the same side where the sewage treatment plant, the tomato cannery and crop fields are located.

"People just aren't accustomed to the wildness. … We have smells that occur from agriculture or agriculture processing. This is just going to be a part of life out here."

Gary Wegener, the city's director of public works, thinks there's been too much fuss, and that the power of suggestion prompted much of the complaining. He says he's detected some unpleasant smells, "but not a whole lot different from previous years."

He acknowledges the city's waste treatment plant can be a stinker sometimes and says the city is working to improve it. But he says it's not the only culprit.

"We can have several sources of odor around town," he says. "It's probably a combination of them all."

The consultant hired by the grower-owned tomato canning plant, Pacific Coast Producers, says he believes it is responsible for some but not all of the stink.

Robert Beggs, an environmental engineer and odor consultant, says he took readings with the Nasal Ranger and is compiling a report for the company. His conclusion, he says, is that 50% of the odor's source is from the plant and the way it spreads wastewater across hayfields. That water, used to wash down tomatoes, is rich with organic material.

Beggs says he recommended the plant treat the water with chemicals before discharge, which it has done, and that it is looking at other ways of discharging its water.

"To the extent we may be part of the problem, we are committed to doing whatever we can to resolve" it, said Mona Shulman, general counsel for the canning company.

Another 20% of the smell source is the city's own sewage treatment plant, Beggs says. The remaining 30%, he says, is probably from a variety of sources — crop fields, animals and other industrial sites.

He, too, says residents may just have to get used to agriculture smells when they live near farms.

"It's fairly common where rural areas are getting developed and wastewater treatment plants are losing their buffer lands," he says.

The tomato plant has finished its work for the season, and Beggs says he thinks the city's problem "is for the most part solved," for now. But he warns with fall comes new smells and air conditions that can keep them lingering.

Flory, the mayor, isn't ready to declare the mystery solved. He says lots of complaints have come from longtime residents, and he's frustrated he can't give them a good answer.

"You want to have a nice image," he says of the city. "And people shouldn't be exposed to these foul odors."

To report corrections and clarifications, contact Reader Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification.

New homes sprout out of farmland on the east side of town, where the sewage treatment plant, the tomato cannery and crop fields are located, and residents aren't accustomed to the smell.

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